Mark Twain, a Biography. Complete eBook

“We expect then, who the little book (for the
care that we wrote him, and for her typographical
correction), that maybe worth the acceptation of the
studious persons, and especially of the Youth, at which
we dedicate him particularly.”]

CXLIV

A SUMMER LITERARY HARVEST

Arriving at the farm in June, Clemens had a fresh
crop of ideas for stories of many lengths and varieties.
His note-book of that time is full of motifs and plots,
most of them of that improbable and extravagant kind
which tended to defeat any literary purpose, whether
humorous or otherwise. It seems worth while setting
down one or more of these here, for they are characteristic
of the myriad conceptions that came and went, and
beyond these written memoranda left no trace behind.
Here is a fair example of many:

Two men starving on a raft. The
pauper has a Boston cracker, resolves to keep
it till the multimillionaire is beginning to starve,
then make him pay $50,000 for it. Millionaire
agrees. Pauper’s cupidity rises, resolves
to wait and get more; twenty-four hours later
asks him a million for the cracker. Millionaire
agrees. Pauper has a wild dream of becoming
enormously rich off his cracker; backs down; lies
all night building castles in the air; next day raises
his price higher and higher, till millionaire has offered
$100,000,000, every cent he has in the world.
Pauper accepts. Millionaire: “Now
give it to me.”

Pauper: “No; it
isn’t a trade until you sign documental history
of
the transaction and make an
oath to pay.”

While pauper is finishing the document
millionaire sees a ship.
When pauper says, “Sign and take the cracker,”
millionaire smiles a
smile, declines, and points to the ship.

Yet this is hardly more extravagant than another idea
that is mentioned repeatedly among the notes—­that
of an otherwise penniless man wandering about London
with a single million-pound bank-note in his possession,
a motif which developed into a very good story indeed.

Ideafor “Stormfield’svisittoheaven”

In modern times the halls of heaven
are warmed by registers connected with hell; and
this is greatly applauded by Jonathan Edwards,
Calvin, Baxter and Company, because it adds a new pang
to the sinner’s sufferings to know that
the very fire which tortures him is the means
of making the righteous comfortable.

Then there was to be another story, in which the various
characters were to have a weird, pestilential nomenclature;
such as “Lockjaw Harris,” “Influenza
Smith,” “Sinapism Davis,” and a dozen
or two more, a perfect outbreak of disorders.

Another—­probably the inspiration of some
very hot afternoon—­was to present life
in the interior of an iceberg, where a colony would
live for a generation or two, drifting about in a
vast circular current year after year, subsisting
on polar bears and other Arctic game.